One of the most important factors in email deliverability that often gets overlooked is engagement rates. What exactly does that mean and how can you use these metrics to your advantage? Quite simply, engagement is how recipients are interacting with your email. The data that ESPs can track around engagement are opens and clicks. Keeping a close eye on open and click rates can tell you a lot about your email deliverability practices. High engagement rates show the ISPs that your recipients are interested in your email, which results in better inbox placement, while low engagement rates can cause a variety of problems for you.

Here are four positive outcomes when you have high engagement rates:

Increased acceptance rates – Getting ISPs to accept your mail is vital to the success of your campaigns. If ISPs don’t accept your mail your recipients won’t even have a chance to open the message, wasting your time and money that could have been spent elsewhere. Having high engagement rates will show the ISPs that these recipients want your mail, and increase the likelihood of getting your mail accepted in your current and future campaigns.

Decreased spam foldering – If your recipients are not opening your emails, that probably means they don’t want them which will result in low engagement rates. From the ISP point of view, they could potentially see this as you spamming customers and place your email in the spam folder. It can be very difficult to dig yourself out of that hole once your mail is being spam foldered.

Better IP reputation – Having a high IP reputation can be very beneficial for you. This will decrease the chance of you getting blacklisted and spam foldered, and increase the chances of getting deliverability issues mitigated quickly. Having high engagement rates is a common characteristic of IPs that have high reputation. You can use this tool to view the reputation of your IPs.

Smoother IP Warmup – We all know how important it is to warm up IPs. When warming up an IP, one of the most crucial factors ISPs take into consideration are engagement rates. We encourage you to begin your IP warm up with your most engaged customers so that your engagement rates start high, increasing the chances of having a successful warm up experience. Low engagement rates can result in a bad IP warmup, which can be devastating and potentially ruin the chances of you using those IPs again.

There are many different ways to raise your engagements rates. Running your content through a spam filter can help lower your spam score and get your mail to the inbox. Restricting your targeted recipients to only email addresses that have opened/clicked an email within the past 30 days will help improve your engagement ratios as these recipients are more likely to open/click on your emails again. Making sure your email list is opt in will increase the chance of having high engagement rates as these recipients have confirmed they want to receive your content.